When Nest Labs announced in January its $3.2 billion sale to Google, at least one other CEO besides its own celebrated.

Orange Chef CEO and founder Santiago Merea has spent the last year developing a smart food scale called the Prep Pad that this week hits the shelves of Williams-Sonoma stores and becomes available for sale online.

Merea is betting that more people will want to know what is in their food, just like they’re curious about the steps they walk and calories they burn, and the energy and cost savings from monitoring their home’s temperature, the insight Nest’s smart thermostats provide. In fact, he’s so bullish on smart “connected devices,” that his goal is to turn basic functional kitchen tools into smart ones. He wants Orange Chef to become the brand of the smart kitchen.

It’s an ambitious vision, considering most consumers don’t own food scales or weigh their food before they eat it. But Merea looks to Nest – which attracted Google with about a million units sold – as validation of the old adage, “If you build it, they will come.”

“The customer is beginning to understand that all of these hardware and software (products) make better sense, and companies are designing these products to empower them to make better decisions,” Merea says.

Orange Chef had a much humbler beginning. In 2011, Merea designed a plastic sleeve to protect his wife’s iPad while she cooked, and got the attention of The New York Times and Oprah Winfrey for its function and design and his commitment to manufacturing in the United States. He eventually added an iPad stand and a stand with a cutting board. Today, 100,000 of those products are in consumers’ homes around the world, providing Orange Chef brand recognition for the Prep Pad.

But much more strategic planning went into that product’s development. Merea and his team spent months visiting customers in their homes, watching them cook and learning about their challenges in the kitchen. He learned that they wanted to build confidence in cooking, to discover new ingredients and preparation methods and to know the true nutrients and calories in the things they prepared.

The Prep Pad does more than weigh an item, just as Nest provides more than cost and energy savings. The Bluetooth-enabled device is designed to work with Orange Chef’s iPad app, Countertop, to help consumers make sense of data about food.

A user places ingredients on the scale and describes them to the Pad (Typing say, two zucchinis or a teaspoon of cinnamon), and it mines a database of 250,000 foods to provide details of its nutrients and calories.

At the same time, the product collects data about how people consume food.

“I like things that generate data every day,” he says. “This is that kind of product. It requires behavioral changes, but if it catches on, it could be really cool.”

Nest paved a path for Orange Chef in other ways, too. It proved that design – even for everyday, boring items – is important, says Renata Quintini of Felicis Ventures, which has invested in connected device companies such as Fitbit and Dropcam.

“It’s a consumer product in the end, and people need to fall in love with it and really covet it,” she says.

Nest also showed that mass distribution could begin with a loyal and vocal fan base – and could evolve into a very strategic mainstream retail partnership. For Nest, that was Apple and then Home Depot. Orange Chef vetted the Pad through a Kickstarter campaign, and will go for high-end food enthusiasts and shoppers at Williams-Sonoma, the kind of consumers willing to pay about $150 for a Prep Pad.

Merea emphasizes he’s building a consumer-product business, not a techie device company.

“I’m sure Nest thought about it in the same way,” Merea says. “Where do people buy thermostats? It’s not really about technology but about lifestyle. Where to be in retail is about where you can add value to the customer’s life.” ■